NOMAD MuVo NX Review: A Memory Stick with a Penchant for Music
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The MP3 player is arguably the final blow to the long-lived walkman. Now the question isn't just "how good does it sound?", but also "how small can it be?" Creative Labs' NOMAD MuVo NX certainly contends in that arena, but is it more than just show?
Perhaps it’s just age talking here, but back in the Rock age (c. 1990, just after the Stone Age), everything seemed so much bigger; real cars came with no less than eight cylinders, the national deficit grew by leaps and bounds, and parachute pants promised an age of unprecedented air travel safety. Of course, in the Rock age, there was no such thing as a PDA, computers were just starting to grow into towering computational marvels, and there were none of these sissy little cell phones we have today, with keypads so small that they’re only accessible by eleven year-old little girls. (Of course, when I try dialing a number all I get is a recorded message saying “Your fingers are too fat. Please just bang on the key pad and an operator will be on to assist you shortly.”)
Although on the surface that seems like a glorious time to live in, the truth was that we were plagued by big, bulky portable devices. For example, the Walkman (with its promise of Run DMC and Guns ‘n Roses any time, anywhere) bounced around like a SuperBall in a toy store while hanging off your MC Hammeresque parachute pants whenever you tried to jog stylishly around your neighborhood. And you could forget about those then new-fangled portable CD players. Too big to fit in your pockets, and jogging with them would have you skipping like a schoolgirl, no matter how many assurances of skip-protection the company covered the product’s packaging with.
Well, we’ve entered the new millennium. Although remnants of the Rock age still linger among us, usually disguised as computer geeks, flea-market lackeys, and cover band members, we’ve entered a new age, one of unprecedented portability and information sharing, brought on by the common sentiment of more for less. To herald this new age, companies have been putting out products which capitalize on this new love affair with miniaturization. The result of this is the now-ubiquitous MP3 player. Creative Labs, a company known for its quality sound cards and speakers, has been at the forefront of this new stage of human thought evolution. They have listened to the market and produced a portable music device small and light enough to truly earn the name portable, the NOMAD MuVo NX.
Creative’s NOMAD series has been a serious runner for the portable MP3 Player’s market domination since the first of the NOMAD series was released. Since then, they’ve held their own quite well against numerous competitors, including Apple, Rio, Sony, and others in the booming MP3 player market. The market has split into two segments: the ultra portable MP3 player, characterized by its use of Flash memory (these are the ones with 64MB-1GB of storage space), and the massive storage MP3 player (characterized by the use of a hard drive for storage). The question remains as to whether this device delivers on its promises of ultra-portability and acceptable sound quality.
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